If you’re weary of the Grey Lady of Nantucket Sound flaunting her finery in pricy restaurants and shops, Nantucket’s North Shore is just the restorative you need.

Frances Ruley Karttunen, whose roots in the community run generations deep, opens our eyes to a more lovable Nantucket before the 20th century. Here are cows whose 4 a.m. milk is delivered just hours later to doorsteps, and who sometimes wander into the town center. Here’s the old woman who confesses on her deathbed that as a child she dug the channel that permanently emptied a pond. Here are the long pitches described by islanders as “cat-slide roofs.”

The author is quick to her point, mingling a welcome brevity with more than a touch of whimsy. Her historical personages spring to life, sounding a lot more interesting than their modern-day counterparts.

You might not think of Nantucket as a land of opportunity, but that’s just what it was for the Mooneys, shipwrecked immigrants whose grandson Lawrence became chief of police and his own son the island’s state representative. The latter-day Mooneys proudly displayed the quarterboard from the wrecked ship, British Queen.

Artist Eastman Johnson captured pickers swarming a cranberry bog before he moved off-island after grouching to a friend in 1881, “Nantucket is no longer such a good place to work in as formerly. There are various excitements, land speculations, etc.”

More content to stay was the formidable Guliema Folger, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, who taught six languages to the children of summer residents. “I can see her walking by with a basket of vegetables to take to someone she didn’t like,” an islander recalled. “She would say the bitterest things about people and then would take them vegetables.”

A quiet current of feminism animates the book, highlighting the contributions of founding mothers as well as fathers. “Franklin owed far more to his mother than his father,” the Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford wrote in 1880 of Abiah Folger Franklin.

Nantucket’s North Shore is visually rich as well, offering a collection of historical photos selected with great care and presented with plenty of space to breathe. You’ll also enjoy many old-time recipes, including ones for plum broth and candy made from flag root.

By book’s end, you’ll wish that the ferry from Hyannis could take you not to modern-day Nantucket but to this vanished land of sturdy people who made their own fun with what little the land offered. And next time you have a glass of water there, you’ll know that it used to come from Washing Pond, where islanders washed their sheep!

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